at the lodge, inside each of the two stories, and all around the deck. The great A-frame building was ablaze and looked formidable in the dark night.
Luce could see the scared faces of a lot of the Nephilim kids who were sitting on the benches around the deck. Jasmine was crying, her red knit cap tugged low on her head. She was holding Lilith's sti hand for support as two cops with notebooks ran through a bunch of questions. Luce's heart went out to the girl. She knew how horri c that process could be.
The cops swarmed around the deck, passing out blown-up black-and-white photocopies of a recent photograph of Dawn that someone had printed o the Internet. Glancing down at the low-resolution image, Luce was surprised to see how much Dawn did resemble her--at least, before she'd dyed her hair. She remembered talking the morning after she'd done it, how Dawn kept joking about their not being Twinkies anymore.
Luce covered her gasp with her hand. Her head hurt as she began to add up so many things that hadn't made sense. Until now.
The awful moment on the life raft. Steven's harsh warning about keeping it a secret. Daniel's paranoia about "dangers" he'd never explained to Luce. The Outcast who'd lured her o campus, the threat that Cam had destroyed in the forest. The way Dawn looked so much like her in the fuzzy black-and-white photograph.
Whoever took Dawn had been mistaken. It was Luce they wanted.
Chapter Twelve
SEVEN DAYS
Friday morning, Luce's eyes blinked open and fell on the clock. Seven-thirty a.m. She'd barely gotten any sleep--she was a mess, worried sick about Dawn and still angry about the past life she'd witnessed the day before via the Announcer. It was so eerie to have seen the moments leading up to her death. Would they all have been like that? Her mind kept running up against the same roadblock over and over again:
If it hadn't been for Daniel ...
Would she have had a shot at a normal life, a relationship with someone else, getting married, having kids, and growing old like the rest of the world? If it hadn't been for Daniel falling in love with her ages ago, would Dawn be missing right now?
These questions were all detours, which eventually owed back to the most important one: Would love be di erent with someone else? Was love even possible with someone else? Love was supposed to be easy, wasn't it? Then why did she feel so tormented?
Shelby's head swung down from the top bunk, her thick blond ponytail dropping behind her like a heavy rope. "Are you as freaked out by all this as I am?"
Luce patted the bed for Shelby to scoot down and sit next to her. Still in her thick red annel pajamas, Shelby slid onto Luce's bed, bringing two giant bars of dark chocolate with her.
Luce was going to say she couldn't possibly eat, but as the scent of the chocolate wafted to her nose, she peeled back the bronze foil and gave Shelby a tiny smile.
"Hits the spot," Shelby said. "You know that thing I said last night about Dawn making out with some greaseball? I feel really bad about it."
Luce shook her head. "Oh, Shel, you didn't know. You can't feel bad about that." She, on the other hand, had plenty of reason to feel sick over what had happened to Dawn. Luce had spent so much time already feeling responsible for the deaths of people near her--Trevor, then Todd, then poor, poor Penn. Her throat closed up at the thought of adding Dawn to the list. She wiped a silent tear away before Shelby could see. It was getting to a point where she was going to have to quarantine herself, to stay away from everyone she loved so that they could be safe.
A knock on their door made Luce and Shelby both jump. The door opened slowly. Miles.
"They found Dawn."
"What?" Luce and Shelby asked, sitting up in unison.
Miles dragged Luce's desk chair over to the bed and sat facing the girls. He took his cap o and wiped his forehead. It was beaded with sweat, like he'd come running across campus to tell them.
"I couldn't sleep last night," he said, turning the cap in his hands. "I was up early, walking around. I ran into Steven and he told me the good news. The people who took her brought her back around sunrise. She's shaken up, but she's not hurt."